8 Interview Questions to Get the Conversation Flowing

8 Interview Questions to Get the Conversation Flowing Is there intelligent life in outer space? Looking in the mirror, you are your own worst critic. It is very easy to pick out your flaws because you are watching yourself in stasis, in one dimension. Your friends, on the other hand, observe you while you’re in motion. They see you when you are laughing or talking on the phone, walking or eating lunch, telling a joke or being sarcastic; they think that you are beautiful and dynamic because they see you as a three-dimensional person â€" and that helps them to overlook your flaws. Hiring managers often view candidates from only one dimension, making it easy for us to see a job seeker’s flaws without fully exploring what they can bring to our organization. And as the hiring outlook continues to improve in 2015, we will need to think even more critically about what we are really trying to learn about a candidate before the interview process begins. It is no longer enough to hire a job seeker based on a static resume and rehearsed responses to expected interview questions. We need to start asking questions that elicit passionate and unscripted answers from job seekers â€" and that helps us to see how a candidate is a cultural fit (or not) for our organization. To do this, pretend that your next interview is a lunch date with a new friend and that you want to learn as much as possible about what makes this person tick. Ask questions that will help you to learn more about your friend’s ambition, interpretation of success and work ethic. Aim, always, to see your friend in three dimensions; the worst thing that a hiring manager can do is to create an interview environment that relegates a job seeker to only one dimension of his/her skill set. Here are eight questions to help you kick off the conversation: 1. Why should we hire you? This is the quintessential question that deserves a great answer. If the candidate can show you without a doubt that he or she must be sitting in that vacant chair come Monday morning, then the query has done its job. 2. How would you spend your first day of work here? More than likely the candidate has played out this scenario in their head. This is their chance to show you how they would hit the ground running, and why they are a great cultural fit. 3. If you could have chosen another career, what would it be and why? This question sounds arbitrary, but in reality, it helps build a three-dimensional view of the candidate. More often than not the answer will be truly surprising and the exact opposite of what they’re doing (or would like to be doing) currently. 4. How do you define success? Success may be something as small as getting a nod of approval from the boss or fixing the copy machine. But some people will tell you they have much bigger ideas of success. If you’re looking for a very ambitious person, or your organization has a specific definition of success, the answer to this will play an important role in your decision. 5. If you caught your boss doing something illegal, what would you do? Yes, this question is sneaky and dangerous, but it will divulge a lot about your candidate â€" including their views on loyalty, trust, honesty, business ethics, and responsibility. 6. If you could be any superhero, who would it be and why? This question not only acts as an icebreaker but also gives you perspective on the candidate’s innermost aspirations â€" and a sense of how far they are willing to dream â€" even if it is only a fantasy. 7. Tell me an appropriate joke. A well-known financial investment firm uses this question in their interviews, mainly because it’s great for sales reps and always puts people at ease. It can also help employers determine if the potential employee has a similar sense of humor â€" a great indicator of a lasting partnership. 8. Is there intelligent life in outer space? Everyone has an opinion on this. The surprising nature of the question will help you judge the emotional maturity of your candidate based on how well he or she handles it. Employers are working hard to ensure that they are courting only the best talent for open positions. However, in addition to confirming that a candidate has the skills necessary to succeed in the position, hiring managers have the immense task of pinpointing whether a candidate fits culturally into the organization. Because no two candidates are the same, and no two companies are alike, the interview process and the specific questions asked should be adaptable. But, they should also aim to provide a platform for candidates to shine â€" and most importantly, to show who they really are beyond their resume or qualifications. Amazing candidates that evolve into strategic employees are the best reflection of you as a hiring manager. Your track record for success will be more attractive if that reflection is three-dimensional. Related reading: 6 Interview Types You Must Know as a Candidate. Suki Shah is the CEO and co-founder of GetHired.com, the leading video-based social recruiting platform and job board that is improving the way employers and job seekers connect in today’s digital world. Follow Suki on Twitter @GetHiredInc.

Your biggest career decision is who you marry

Your biggest career decision is who you marry Sheryl Sandberg, the woman who runs Facebook,  has said that the most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry. I have to agree with this statement. Here’s why: If you marry someone with a big career and you want to have a big career you have to find that rare mate who can treat you as an equal, even when your career needs to come first. These are very tough marriages to hold together because there is a constant, never-ending re-balancing of priorities and power between spouses. If you marry a breadwinner who expects their career to come first, then things will probably only work if you can support that. Even if you have a career of your own.  This is the easiest marriage to hold together (if any marriage can be called easy) as long as the man is the breadwinner. If you marry someone who is terrible at earning money, or someone who is good at earning money but doesn’t want to, then you will have to take responsibility for earning the money. In each of these cases, your career decisions are largely determined by who you choose as your mate. If the idea of being in a long-term, committed relationship makes you sick, you should stop reading now, and click over to Beatrice de Guignes stunning parody of wedding photography, featuring Barbie and Ken. If you still hold out hope for marriage, here  are my five favorite ways to get a spouse: 1. Network. Getting a spouse is the first big test of your networking abilities. If you’re really well networked, like George Percy, then you can look around at who you know and who your friends know and pick someone. If you go the networking route, the same rules of networking for a getting a job apply to networking to get a spouse. Which means that the most valuable people in your network are people who you are not that close to because those people will likely know a bunch of people who you don’t already know. This seems like a good time to tell the story of how my brother met his wife. He came to visit me at college, and it was a weekend when there was a dance. And it turned out that my date was gay, and because I was so stupid about dating  I was a) the only person in the school who didn’t know and b) too shy to cancel the date. I asked my brother to come, to save me, but he needed a date. So I asked a woman in my suite who I had recently gotten to know. The dance sucked, I couldn’t find my brother, and when I came home, he was making out with the woman in my entrance way. I remember standing there, stunned, and then saying: “What are you guys doing?” 2. Try online dating sites. That was before dating sites. Today dating sites make things easier, for the lucky 23% of people who can get dating sites to pan out. Most dating sites specialize. ScientificMatch matches you based on your DNA. Salon is for intellectuals. OK Cupid is more Jewish than JDate. JDate is rife with intellectual snobs and eastern-seaboard snobs who figure they can sort for their demographic by sorting for Jews. Feeling frustrated and ripped off? Luvia specializes in people who want a better payment fee structure for online dating. Really. The founder of Luvia, Ravi, says: Theres no monthly fee or any premium services fee. And registration is totally free. Luvia.com is very economical because  we charge based on usage. 3. Use a headhunter. When I was thirty and not married and starting to panic, I hired a headhunter. Heres why: I was thirty, I had just launched my second startup after exiting the first one, and I was a former professional beach volleyball player. I knew I was a good catch, but I had no time or patience for dating. The headhunter charged me $10,000 and for that, she taught me how you pick a husband. She told me you only get what you are worth. She told me that I’m an eight so I can get an eight. Then she told me I could give her three criteria and she’d meet them. First, I picked good looking, rich, and Jewish. She set me up with the only Jewish Calvin Klein model. I mean, maybe there were two, but it’s hard to believe there are two Jewish men as shallow as this guy was. Really. I think their moms wouldn’t allow it. So I swapped rich for smart. And I got a screenwriter. Unemployed, of course. After all, I was in LA. I knew I needed criteria to wipe out the screenwriters. That’s important in LA, because everyone’s a screenwriter. Even the homeless. Actually, especially the homeless. I spent a lot of time developing a perfect list of three things, and I came up with Jewish, good looking and great at what he does. I thought this last one would be sneaky because you probably are smart and rich if you are great at what you do. These guys were right up my alleythe type I was used to hanging out with. At work. So I had a hard time keeping dating talk to dating topics and almost all those dates turned into business meetings. Just when the headhunter was getting frustrated with me, my ex-boyfriend told me he was in LA and asked if I wanted to get together for sex. I said, Okay, if we get married. He said okay. He bought me a ring from the LA County museum, on the way to my apartment. We had sex. It seemed right because he was good-looking, Jewish, and great at what he did. (He was a video artist. One day I will spew my wide-ranging knowledge of video art on this blog.) 4. Go to therapy. Hiring the headhunter was like going to therapy. You know, those fairy tales about having three wishes aren’t really about the wishes. They’re about learning what’s important to you. (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble  is a fun, contemporary take on this story.) The fairy tales are about the power of self-knowledge, and how hard it is to come by. Which is really what dating is all about. You have to give stuff up to get married. Picking a spouse is a lot like picking a locationit’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give up. You have to be really clear on what you are not willing to give upbecause you’ll probably be giving up everything else. You have to assume you are. And it’s hard. Most of adult life is about admitting what you will not be able to have or be able to do. Marriage is no exception. If you can’t accept that, going to therapy can helpyou get stuck otherwise. Which wouldn’t be so bad if you don’t want kids. But stalled dating under the tick-tock of a biological clock is no good for anyone. 5. Compromise your career. It’s true that who you marry is your most important career decision. But it’s also your most important financial decision, your most important parenting decision, and on and on. No one ever says that they knew what they were getting when they picked their spouse. Twenty years down the line, everyone is surprised. So the choice is impossible to perfect because the information you have about your options is so poor. People change, and people don’t know who they are so they can’t disclose who they are. And life before kids does not resemble life with kids, so how do you even know how the person will react when the kids come? It’s hubris to say this does not apply to you. But of all the things that spouses affect, and with all the things you have to compromise in order to hold a marriage together, a career seems like a small price to pay. People who are married are happier than people who are not. And I think it’s mostly that people are happier when they put the requirements of being in a committed relationship ahead of the other aspects of their life. And a career would be the first thing I’d tell you to give up. You can get a lot more from loving and being loved.

Its Time to Show Off Your Talent On Your LinkedIn Profile

Its Time to Show Off Your Talent On Your LinkedIn Profile Are you looking for a better way to represent your career and life experiences? You can easily show them off with photos, videos and samples of work, however, you dont need to build a website to have an online portfolio LinkedIn is your answer! Visual content is better: Your LinkedIn profile is more than just a boring online resume adding images will enhance your profile.  Studies have shown that websites with good quality photos are more trusted than those with no images or poor quality images and, according to urban legend, our brains process images faster than text! So by adding images to your LinkedIn profile  it looks more credible  AND you get your message across faster! Adding visual elements to your LinkedIn profile will entice, lure and garner the interest of people reading your profile. Most, if not  all, LinkedIn users have the ability to add photos, screen shots, video and audio content to their profiles. What media can you add to your profile? By: Link Humans LinkedIn says it officially supports images,  presentations, documents,  video, and audio by certain providers listed  here. For example, if there is a YouTube video featuring you on a panel discussion or giving a presentation, you can link it to your profile. You can even upload files from your computer such as Powerpoint presentations, documents and images. Where can you put it? You can embed media at the end of your summary, within each position listed in your  experience  section, and in your  education  section. All you have to do is edit your profile and look for the little blue box. Of course, you will have to upload or link to content, so What Media and Talents to Showcase Any sample of your work would work. The media you choose needs to provide proof you know how to do what you say on your profile. You can also think about what differentiates you from the hundreds of people who have the same job title as you: Is there a picture of you receiving an award? Have you given a presentation or spoken at a conference? Have you written articles? What would you show during an interview to prove you have the skills to do the job? These are the images, articles and content you can create and publish yourself online. Think of your LinkedIn profile as an online portfolio! You will need to begin collecting screen shots and links that supply visual proof of your expertise, talent and personality. More profile content ideas: You may have letters of recommendation from people who arent on LinkedIn. You can scan them and upload the letter. Or take customer quotes from emails and create a testimonial document or presentation. Just be sure you either get permission or omit identifying information. Maybe you are a guru and creating Excel pivot tables. Film a screen cast showing how you convert the data and upload it to YouTube. Voila! RELATED:  How to Maximize Your  LinkedIn Profile You dont have anything? If you don’t have anything, create it! You can create a Powerpoint highlighting your accomplishments or telling your story. If you want some ideas, search SlideShare using the term visual resume and see what other people have created. If you are interested in creating something a bit jazzier than Powerpoint, you may want to test Prezi.com. Search this site using the term visual cv. Think creatively: The options are endless. You can get ideas from corporate marketing campaigns too! Inspiration is all around you. Begin thinking about how you will market yourself and start clipping! RELATED:  How to Create the Perfect  LinkedIn Profile